My Mac mini froze hard enough that I held the power button to get it back. My first suspect was the macOS beta. My second was a terminal multiplexer I had been trialling. Both were wrong, and I had skipped the one check that would have pointed at the answer in about four seconds: the disk was full. My dotfiles repo tracks 2 MB of content, and it had grown to 31 GB. 26 GB of that was garbage, and two disk cleaners had already looked straight at it and reported nothing to clean.
A Homebrew cask upgrade on 2026-08-28 left my `claude` binary hanging forever on `--version`. No error, no exit, just a prompt that never came back. For two days nothing looked wrong, because every session already open kept working perfectly. The first person to notice was the first person to open a new one. The signature was valid. The bytes were intact. A byte-identical copy of the file, sitting in the same directory, started instantly while the original hung. That left exactly one thing it could be, and it was not the file.
My dotfiles repo has a CLAUDE.md, and the CLAUDE.md has a rule in bold: every commit must pass the test suite, no exceptions. Within the first hour of an audit this July, I learned that this rule had been enforced exactly zero times since the day it was written. The hook file existed, its contents were correct, it even had its executable bit. It was just sitting at a path that yadm stopped reading a major version ago. No error message. No warning. To yadm, a hook in the wrong place and no hook at all are the same thing.
In July I went three weeks without opening my blog repo. During those weeks it published two posts, on schedule, each one confirmed live by an automated check, and the only reason I know all this is a green history in the Actions tab. The system's single notification channel is a failure email, and it has never fired. This post is the full pipeline, including the parts that only exist because something went wrong on the way here. 🧪 Tested with Hugo 0.164.0 · Cloudflare Pages The one Hugo fact everything hangs on # Hugo skips content dated in the future unless you pass --buildFuture (docs). That single default turns the date field into a release valve. Merge a post dated next Tuesday and production simply does not contain it: not in the sitemap, not in RSS, not at its URL. It sits in main, invisible, until a build happens after its date.
The last deliverable of my summer project was a slide deck in the official university template. I generate slides from Python, and my first instinct was to rebuild the branding by hand: sample the navy, find the fonts, redraw the footer. That path produces decks that look almost right, which is worse than wrong. The trick that works is to load the official .pptx itself, delete every sample slide while keeping the slide masters, and add my own slides on the official layouts. Backgrounds, fonts, and logo come along for free. Auditing AI-Solvability · Part 5 of 5 1 2 3 4 5 The generator is one Python file, roughly 470 lines of python-pptx, and it built the final presentation for the auditing project from part 1. This post is about the two things in it worth stealing and the one bug worth laughing at.
At Twitter, I was responsible for kernel updates across **5,000+ production servers**. Updating a kernel is risky on one machine. Doing it across a fleet, without downtime, without data loss, and without breaking the services that millions of people depend on, is a different problem entirely. The Problem # Twitter’s production infrastructure ran on thousands of bare-metal servers across multiple data centers. Each server ran a Linux kernel that needed regular updates for security patches, performance improvements, and hardware compatibility.
Every developer eventually reaches the point where their configs become too valuable to lose. Here's how I use **yadm** to manage my macOS dotfiles with automated testing, daily maintenance, and a pre-commit workflow that keeps everything in check. For me, the turning point was spending a weekend setting up a new MacBook and realizing I couldn’t reproduce my environment reliably. That’s when I started managing my dotfiles properly.